A universal serial bus (USB) communication system comprises a host and a device which are connected by four parallel conductors carrying the supply voltage VCC, the ground GND and the data line signals D+ and D−. There is no dedicated conductor for a clock signal. Instead, a “non-return to zero invert” (NRZI) is used to encode a clock signal on the data lines D+ and D−. To decode the clock signal a USB-device requires a precise crystal quartz oscillator. However, the oscillators need to be calibrated which increases the testing time for the USB-device. Further, using such oscillators on USB-devices which offer only a small amount of space such as for example a smart card or an integrated circuit card is a challenge. In USB-devices in which an oscillator cannot be implemented due to space limitations, clock recovery circuits are used to obtain the clock signal from the transmitted data. However, to generate the required very precise clock signal out of the USB data stream requires complex circuitry with analog parts and digital parts needing digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities. Further, such clock recovery circuits have a high power consumption which is a challenge especially in battery operated applications, such as, for example, a USB-subscriber identity module (SIM)-card.